Yes, Sasha Calle Really Got to Drive the Chevy Corvette in ‘Sugar’

On her first day of filming the latest season of Sugar , Sasha Calle had a feeling a déjà vu. It wasn’t that she had been on set with Colin Farrell before or that she was ever behind the wheel of a Corvette Sting Ray, but something did feel familiar.

“I had no idea where we were shooting. A lot of the time, you’re just so focused on so many things, and then you get driven to a location, you go, ‘Wait a second,’” remembers Calle, who quickly realized that production was shooting on the same street as her old college, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Hollywood. Related Stories TV 'Sugar' Star Tony Dalton Breaks Down That Duel in the Desert and Accidentally Punching Colin Farrell TV 'Sugar' Boss Sam Catlin on Importing the 'Breaking Bad' Universe to Los Angeles

Standing on the corner of Yucca and Cahuenga, a block away from her old dorm room, she couldn’t help but feel a little sentimental. “I arrived at that college and I had no idea or concept of what Hollywood would look like,” she says. “I always thought I was going to go back to Boston. I arrived in L.A. and I kind of just hustled it out.”

Fast forward 13 years and Sugar is just the latest role for the East Coast native, whose year started out with the release of Netflix action thriller The Rip . In a short amount of time Calle has built a career that has run the Hollywood gamut, from soap operas ( Young and the Restless ) to superheroes (DC’s The Flash ) to festival indies ( On Swift Horses ). And, up next, she will be in Mike Flanagan’s Exorcist take with Scarlett Johansson and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

But, for now, back to Sugar . Calle signed on for the second season of the Apple neo-noir as Val, a jack-of-all-trades sidekick and protege to Farrell’s John Sugar. In addition to working with Farrell and Sugar ’s creative team, including showrunner Sam Catlin, shooting in Los Angeles was one of the perks of the job.

Calle, who also shot Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses in the city, knows it is a rarity getting to shoot in L.A. at a time when film and television productions are heading to other corners of the globe. “Filming is now so spread out, we can make movies in a lot of places, now,” she says. Shooting in L.A. meant that Calle’s Great Dane, Dragon, was able to come to set and the days could be filled with little moments of personal serendipity, like when production moved on to the same lot where she spent two-and-a-half years shooting The Young and the Restless right after graduating acting school. She says, “We’re going to all these locations. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I have a memory here. I have a memory there.’”

Val’s introduction come by way of a carjacking that sees Sugar’s baby blue 1966 Chevrolet Corvette stolen and then quickly and conveniently retrieved by Val, who just so happens to be standing nearby when the theft happened. “That car is stunning,” says Calle. When it came to driving the car onscreen, Calle quickly volunteered her services. Calle remembers, “They were like, “We’re gonna have a stunt jump in and drive, and I was like, ‘I’ll do it.’ They’re like, ‘Well, it’s expensive, and we need it to go a little faster.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.